The World Wide Web (“the Web”) is a system for publishing information, in which users may use a web browser application to retrieve information, such as web pages, from web servers and display it. Search engines, subject indices, and links between web pages and web sites facilitate the exploration of information published on the Web.
The Web has increasingly become a medium used to shop for products. Indeed, thousands and thousands of different products may be purchased on the Web. A user who plans to purchase a product on the Web can visit the Web site of a Web merchant that sells the product, view information about the product, give an instruction to purchase the product, and provide information needed to complete the purchase, such as payment and shipping information.
Some web merchants provide services for recommending products to users based on profiles that have been developed for such users. A user's profile is commonly based upon a list of products already purchased by the user, or upon the user's responses to a survey about his or her interests.
By recommending additional products to a user in this manner, a web merchant can often sell a recommended product to a user that would not have otherwise purchased it, thereby generating additional sales and profits for the web merchant. Further, such recommendation services often have utility to the user, identifying items that would be useful to the user and of which the user was previously unaware.
While conventional recommendation systems can produce significant benefits, they also have substantial shortcomings. In general, the list of items recommended by a particular recommendation service is fairly static, requiring the user to purchase a number of new items or repeat the survey to update his or her profile and obtain new recommendations. Further, because such recommendation systems require users to use one of these methods to modify the contents of their profile in order to change a set of recommendations, they are relatively inflexible and do not provide a high level of user control. Further, because they are based upon the user's profile, they are not particularly useful either to recommend gifts for others having different interests, or to recommend items to a user that are in a new area of interest to the user that is not reflected in the user's profile.
In view of these disadvantages of conventional recommendation systems, a more flexible recommendation system that afforded a high level of user control would have significant utility.